The simple economics of commons: a review of Brett M. Frischmann, “Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources”

Brett Frischmann’s goal in “Infrastructure: the social value of shared resources” is to pose and reflect on two central questions that are at the core of many contentious debates in law, economics, and public policy. First, we often take for granted infrastructure resources that shape our public and private lives. You are probably right now using one of the major pieces of infrastructure on which we daily rely on: the Internet. We heavily depend on this resource. The question, posed by Frischmann, is how much do we depend on this and other infrastructure resources that serve as “means to many ends”? To put it differently, where does the value for fundamental infrastructure, such as the Internet, roads, basic research, laws, or languages, come from? The second difficult question examined in this book is what is the optimal management regime for infrastructure to generate the maximum social value?

Once these two questions were asked, the author examines the range of important...